Twenty years ago, I met a dog whose eyes held the whole sky... I didn't know then that I wasn't just gaining a dog. I was signing up for twenty years of being taught, patiently and repeatedly, how to love something that could not speak. Loving a new animal does not quietly erase the one who came before — if anything, it proves how much that first love mattered, because you're choosing to survive its absence by giving the same gift again.